


Mirror Mirror

by greenglowsgold



Series: Mirror Mirror [1]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (I put gen along with M/M because honestly... it's LIGHT), 2x13 spoilers, Gen, I had to think for a while about whether to tag it, M/M, light on the Barrisco here, show-level violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 21:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6025684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenglowsgold/pseuds/greenglowsgold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cisco's doppelganger might be dead, but that doesn't mean he's gone, or that Cisco is done learning from him.</p><p>AKA the "Cisco is a terrifying Big Damn Hero" fic</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mirror Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by lots of conversation on tumblr following last week's episode, especially [this post](greenglowsgold.tumblr.com/post/139033423090/). Hahaha, I got it finished before the next ep airs tomorrow!

“Did you know?” Cisco demanded, crowding into Harry’s space.

“Ramon, that is not important right no—”

“Did you _know_?” Cisco repeated, leaving no room for argument. This wasn’t how it normally went; Harry was far more used to the being the one to tell _him_ how things were going to go, but he wasn’t backing down. That other version of himself, he’d said that they could be gods. Well, he didn’t believe that, didn’t want it, but he could at least get Harry to give him some answers.

Harry grit his teeth. “I suspected,” he said finally, eyes darting to the side. “The powers of this world’s Cisco Ramon were discovered in the early stages of testing for my metahuman detection application, and he vanished shortly after. When metas disappear like that these days, it means either the government got to them, or Zoom did. But in your limited time here, I doubted it would be relevant.”

Cisco pushed away from him, disgusted. With Harry, with himself, he wasn’t sure. “Well, it was.”

“It’s _not_ ,” Harry corrected him harshly, taking advantage of the space to try to regain control. “This changes nothing, especially now that he’s dead.” He said it flatly, not a hint of care. Which, Cisco wasn’t overly fond of Reverb either, but still. “Our priority is still to find Zoom and my daughter, now more than ever. Barry will be with them, if he’s still alive.”

“He is.” If Barry had gone missing yesterday, Cisco couldn’t have been sure, but now he knew. When Reverb fell, he’d felt something snap, like the last desperate beat of a heart. If he could feel that, then he knew without a doubt that he would feel it if Barry died. “How are we going to find them?”

All of their leads had dried up. Barry was gone, and with him any chance of getting cooperation from the police department. Maybe they could approach Iris, but she was busy dealing with a partner who’d been hospitalized by a man who looked identical to Cisco, and a husband who she would soon realize was missing. It seemed hopeless. At least, it did to Cisco, but Harry didn’t hesitate even a moment before speaking.

“You’ll look for them, obviously.” When Cisco turned, Harry was standing just behind him, tapping his fingers impatiently. “Come on, that was always the plan.”

Cisco bristled. “Yeah, it was, until we found out that your stupid planet vibrates at a different frequency than mine. Did you forget about that? The glasses are useless.” A small, guilty part of him was glad for that, because one look at those glasses and all he could see was his doppelganger's face, smiling and offering him power.

“The glasses are a conduit, Cisco. You have the visions. All you need is a little… motivation.”

All of a sudden, Harry was much closer than he’d been a moment ago, looming over Cisco with a dark expression. Cisco took an instinctive step back, feeling anger pool in his stomach. He wasn’t ready to give up control here, not yet. He was powerful, his other self had told him. Shouldn’t he be able to do these things for himself without being backed into a corner like a frightened rabbit?

Apparently not.

Harry had snatched up the jacket that Barry had worn earlier that day, thrusting it into Cisco’s arms. “Focus on Barry. Find him.”

“What makes you think I can—”

“Because you’re in love with him.”

Cisco jerked. His mouth worked. How…?

“Don’t bother,” Harry snapped, before he could ask a question. “It’s obvious, not the I care either way, but it means that you _can_ find him. Anywhere. Can’t you?”

Just a minute ago, he’d been so certain that Barry was alive, that he would feel it if something happened. He thought of every time he’d shut himself in a room or clamped his hands over his head, pushing his vision into blue just because he _needed to know_ , and how none of those times had the same urgency as he did now. “Yeah, I can.”

Harry nodded shortly. “Good.” He thrust the jacket harder against Cisco, shoving him back another step. “Then do it.”

Cisco clutched the jacket to his chest, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to reach out. Whatever it was, he begged, he needed it _now_.

“You need to locate him before he dies,” Harry continued, barely leaving him a second of silence. Cisco wanted to yell at him to stop, but he knew this was what they needed for it to work. “Every second he spends with Zoom is dangerous.”

 _Please, please_ , Cisco thought. _He said I was powerful. What good is it if I can’t even help Barry?_ “ _Come on_ ,” Harry urged. “Don’t you care at all?”

Cisco drew in a breath. Of course he did.

“Then _find him_.”

Harry pushed out one more time, and Cisco’s back hit the wall with a dull _thump_.

 

_Thud._

_Barry lurched back from the unmarred glass, clutching his shoulder and wincing._

_Cisco tried to rush forward at the sight, but he was moving through molasses. He couldn’t get any closer to the little glass cell that held his friend, shaking out his muscles and flicking his eyes around frantically for an escape route._

_Tearing his gaze away from Barry, Cisco tried to take in the room. There were more cells along the walls, and people in them. One was familiar — Jesse was still alive, for now at least — another was not. The room was just as dingy and unremarkable as he remembered it. Come on, come on, there had to be something, some clue as to where this was._

_”Barry,” he gasped. “Where are you?”_

_Barry hesitated for just a moment where he stood, and Cisco almost thought he might have heard him, but then Barry shook it off and steadied again, looking for a weak spot in the glass. He rammed himself forward against a corner._

_Thud._

 

He was back in Harry’s office.

“Well?” Harry asked, eyebrow raised.

“I had him.” Cisco bent his head, sifting frantically through the memory for anything he could use. He couldn’t find it, just kept hearing the _thud_ of Barry’s body hitting the glass, echoing in his head over and over. “I had him, I don’t—”

“So we’ll try it again,” Harry said impatiently, but Cisco shook his head.

“No, no, wait, I can… Find it…” There was something important, something he was missing, and if he started in on something else he might lose it. He just had to figure out what it _was_.

_Thud. Thud. Thud._

Was that Harry?

“Would you just _shut up_?” he snapped, and Harry, surprised, took a step back, falling silent.

In the quiet of the room, the soft, rhythmic thuds were the only thing Cisco could hear. Oh. _Oh._ He nearly laughed.

It was a _heartbeat_.

“I know where he is,” Cisco breathed with a soft laugh. He knew that jackrabbit beat anywhere. He wasn’t sure how he was hearing it, but it was there, tugging at him from across the city.

Then there was another tug: Harry’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him to the car.

 

 

The drive was nerve-wracking, as much because of his tenuous hold on the vibrations as Harry’s lack of regard for traffic regulations. Or maybe this kind of reckless driving was standard on Earth-2; Cisco wouldn’t know. He didn’t know the rules for using his powers this way either, which meant a lot of breathless moments when the heartbeat they were following seemed to fade out for several seconds before bursting back to life.

The problem was that his powers seemed to require a tuner with fine control, and Cisco had lost the remote. Concentrating on whatever-it-was sometimes made the heartbeat feel stronger, but just as often it seemed to throw it to the side in favor of a vision. At least those visions were usually of Barry.

Barry pushing against the glass walls of his prison. Barry sitting in a corner, head in his hands. Barry trying to talk to the others in the room, getting little in return. Barry pressed back by Zoom’s claws, gasping as lightning drained out of his pores (God, Cisco hoped that was only a future possibility, one they would stop before it could come true).

And then one time, after the heartbeat had faded so much he was worried he’d lose it altogether, Cisco had closed his eyes and seen himself.

His doppelganger, actually, he realized after a moment. Evil-Cisco was staring at him, smirking, and for a moment Cisco thought he had come back somehow, that he wasn’t dead. But his hair was different, shorter. This must have been the past.

But when the other Cisco spoke, it was to address him directly: ‘ _You’re never going to beat him, not like that. I told you, you have power. But you need to use it._ ’

Cisco recoiled, a strange sensation of having empty space behind him when he knew there should be the seat of the car. “Like you use it, you mean?”

He didn’t actually expect Evil-Cisco to answer, since this was a memory, but his other self laughed and shook his head like he’d heard every word. ‘ _Don’t tell me you’re not impressed._ ’ He raised his hand, and Cisco took another step back. He remembered what those hands could do. ‘ _Come on,_ Vibe. Fight back.’

When he saw a burst shoot toward him, Cisco threw up his hands, gritting his teeth. He expected to feel the impact of the waves hitting him, but instead he felt something ripple _away_ from him. He eased open one eye to see everything still once again, and his doppelganger nodding at him.

‘ _Good job._ ’

He found himself back in the car, and didn’t notice they had stopped until after he’d spent a few seconds scrambling to make sure he could still find Barry’s heartbeat. When he did, he turned to Harry. “Why aren’t we moving?”

Harry gave him an incredulous look. “Ramon…”

He was never lost for words. Cisco looked around nervously, and found that the windows of the car had been blown out, leaving only a few cracked bits around the edges. The windshield was holding, but badly cracked, and he was breathing hard. He took a shaky breath. Okay. So that was how this was going to go.

“Come on,” he said, trying to feign confidence. “Let’s keep going.”

 

 

When they pulled up in front of the building, Harry finally questioned him, and Cisco couldn’t blame him. This was the run-down, edge-of-town sort of place he’d imagined, from all his views of the inside, but the heartbeat was insistent. Apparently, Zoom was a hide-in-plain-sight type. They should have figured.

“Jesse’s in there?” Harry asked again, mouth tight.

Cisco nodded.

“What about Zoom?”

That was the trouble. To keep the heartbeat in his head, he had to focus on Barry. He thought about dropping it, for a split second, to try to find Zoom, but, no. He couldn’t do it. Even as the thought occurred to him, the beating sped up, even faster than its normal pace. Cisco felt a thread of panic, wondering what the cause could be. Excitement? Pain? Fear?

He went inside. Harry followed him through the halls, hissing reprimands that Cisco didn’t heed.

“ _Slow down,_ Ramon, we can’t afford to be— _Jesse_.”

Harry abandoned his protests the moment he set eyes on his daughter, rushing blindly forward into the room. Cisco already knew where everything would be, and his eyes went straight to Barry, standing against the glass with wide eyes.

“Cisco, look out!”

A streak of blue lighting shot into the room, knocking Harry out of his path and against the wall before coming to a stop before Cisco. “Haven’t I already killed one of you today?”

Cisco swallowed, and it rasped in his dry throat. “I’m persistent,” he said, and raised his hands to— Nothing.

He sucked in a breath, tried again and again to pull at the thread he’d found in the car, but nothing happened. Nothing at all. Had he imagined it?

Zoom chuckled. “It seems—”

The blast caught him full in the chest, punching him back across the room, where he landed with a crunch. Cisco let out his breath, unable to stop the hint of a smile from working onto his face. Yes. _Yes._

But he couldn’t lower his hands, because Zoom was already standing up again. “Do you know why your other self never tried that on me?” Behind him, Barry was banging on the glass again, shouting for Cisco to let him out, to run, to do something. Then Zoom was all Cisco could say, inches away and pressing him against the crumbling wall with a hand against his throat. “Because he was _intelligent_.”

Cisco pulled a hand up desperately between them, gasping for air, but Zoom was ready for it. He held on tight against the wave, and instead of separating them, it spun them across the room, banging them both against whatever stood in their way. Cisco’s back was covered in bruises, and he still couldn’t breathe.

He gasped as they moved again, suddenly, realizing only once they came to a stop that Zoom had moved to avoid Harry’s shot. Harry tried running forward next, which was a stupid move, but apparently being in the same room as his daughter had affected his judgement. Zoom batted him aside in a second and turned back to Cisco. “The question you should be asking yourself right now is: how can I make myself useful to—”

Cisco saw Harry smirk out of the corner of his eye a second before the blast, a tiny explosion centralized on Zoom’s back. He must have planted something on Zoom’s suit in that moment of contact, Cisco thought dazedly as he dropped to the floor, gasping for air. Good for him.

Zoom was getting up again, but a little slower than the last time. His suit seemed to have shielded him from most of the effects, but a concussive blast was no joke. Cisco’s eyes flickered around the room, searching for anything that could help them. He could shoot his own blast at Zoom again, but that wouldn’t work forever, Zoom was too fast.

He heard the thudding again, both in his head and across the room. Barry, of course. Cisco thought back to what had happened in the car; he just needed a wide-range wave. Just as Zoom regained his footing, Cisco took a deep breath, and prayed.

He felt the blast shoot out from him on all sides. He was pretty sure he might’ve shouted, too, just to give it a little extra oomph, but no one called him out on it. Even before the pieces of cracked glass had hit the floor, Barry was darting into the room, colliding with Zoom and pushing him away from Cisco.

In a second, there was nothing left to see but what looked like a localized lightning storm, and Cisco’s breath caught at the sight. He’d seen things like it before, but more often than not he was back in the control room while the speedster battles were raging outside. This must have been what it had looked like for Barry when he was a kid, watching two streaks invade his home, except he hadn’t known what it was.

Cisco raised his hand. He wanted desperately to help, but there was no way to tell which of them was where, no way to aim so he’d hit Zoom and not Barry. The only good thing was that they’d remained in the room instead of taking to the streets, but even now, Cisco couldn’t tell who was winning.

Or, he couldn’t tell until one shape went flying out of the storm, crashing into the remains of a glass cage in a blur of red and yellow.

“Barry!” he yelled, trying to push himself upright and crashing back down again when his leg shook underneath him, crackling with pain. He crawled instead, pulling himself over the ground between them. Barry’s eyes were only half-open when he got there, blinking sluggishly against the dim light. Cisco patted at his face, risking a glance to the side. He couldn’t understand why Zoom hadn’t come over yet.

As soon as he looked, he realized. Zoom was watching them. Cisco couldn’t be sure, but he swore Zoom’s eyes lingered on the hand on Barry’s face. He shivered; he felt invaded, laid bare. He’d given Zoom something, he was sure.

He saw the split second when Zoom braced himself to move and tried to bring up a hand to do something, anything, to slow him down. But with the rush of wind that preceded Zoom, he felt everything draw toward him, not away.

Cisco felt, in a moment that stretched to every corner of the room, an overwhelming sensation. Like when he’d first found Barry’s heartbeat, but a hundred-fold, because it was every heartbeat in the room, every footstep, every tap of falling debris, frequencies of things he couldn’t even identify. There was one, particularly strong and branching out from Zoom like threads of lightning, and it seemed to invite Cisco in, so he reached out a hand, and pulled.

Zoom fell to the floor halfway across the room.

Cisco watched, breathless, and he shook his head, stumbling shakily to his feet. What had happened? He hadn’t even seen anything, no wave of vibrations to disrupt the movement, but Zoom had dropped. And when he got to his feet… there was no lightning.

“What…?”

He moved forward again, but Cisco shot out a blast, a real one this time, and forced him back against the opposite wall. Zoom grunted, and as soon as the wave stopped, he turned and went for the door. But he did it no faster than a normal human, and suddenly Cisco understood. He didn’t have his speed.

Cisco blasted forward again, this time aimed at the door, which slammed shut before Zoom could reach it. He felt like he could laugh. Zoom was powerless, and they had him trapped. Cisco stood, the pain in his leg forgotten in the excitement. With a flick of his wrist, he sent Zoom to the floor again.

Zoom was much less graceful without his powers. It occurred to Cisco that they didn’t see him move much, not properly, only in ways that were blurred out with speed. Now, he lunged clumsily to the side, grasping for Harry’s gun where it lay abandoned. Cisco didn’t think the darts would have much effect on him, but he blasted it out of Zoom’s hands anyway, on the chance he might think to aim for Barry.

“Am I useful now?” he said, taking a step closer. It was a weird sense of triumph, exhilarating because it was so unexpected. “Or do you have other things to worry about?”

Zoom tried only one more time to stand, and when Cisco pushed him back down, he didn't move. He was unconscious. If Cisco concentrated, he could feel his heartbeat — slow and steady, void of lightning.

“Yes!” With a short, breathless laugh, Cisco lowered his hands and stepped back. Had they really done it, after trying for so long? He let his eyes move off of Zoom and found Harry already by his daughter’s side, offering her a water bottle and fussing endlessly. The man in the mask was standing at the edge of the room, probably watching them from beneath the mask, which was… creepy, but whatever. He wasn’t doing anything.

Cisco turned back to find Barry looking more alert, and went to help him up. He could already feel the adrenaline wearing off, and he knew the pain in his leg would be back with a vengeance. Hopefully Barry would be steady on his feet in a minute; he did heal pretty fast. “Barry.”

He held out a hand, and Barry flinched back, banging his head against the wall. Cisco raised an eyebrow.

“Whoa, dude, you okay?” Maybe he was more rattled than Cisco had thought. “Barry?”

“I’m, uh. It’s…” Cisco watched Barry take in a shaky breath and look up, and grew instantly more concerned at the look on his face. He opened his mouth to tell Barry it was okay, Zoom was unconscious, but stopped.

He recognized that expression. It was the same one that had been on his face when he met his doppelganger. It was…

Oh, God. Barry was scared of him.

He took a step back, and his breath caught when Barry visibly relaxed at the movement. He felt sick. Avoiding Barry’s eyes, Cisco turned around, making his way over to Jesse and Harry. “Hey,” he muttered, interrupting a Hallmark-style hug. “Barry needs some help.”

“So help him,” Harry said, refusing to move back, but his daughter gave his side a little shove.

“Dad…”

Harry looked up, surveying Cisco’s face. “...Fine. Stay with her.”

Without her father’s arms, Jesse leaned more heavily against the floor, taking deep breaths. Harry must have been squeezing her pretty hard. Still, she seemed surprisingly calm for someone who’d been in a cage for the last several months. “Do you need a hand?” he asked, hoping it would go better than last time.

Jesse gave him a shaky smile and grabbed his hand, steadying herself against him as she stood. “Thanks.”

“Are you okay?” Stupid question.

“Better than I was a few minutes ago.” Her eyes darted nervously around the room, and she clearly needed a hot meal, but she was standing and talking, so he’d take that as a good sign. “Where did you even come from?”

He wondered if the whole ‘multiple universes’ thing had been explained to her yet. “Uh. We’re friends of your dad’s.” He glanced over his shoulder to where Harry was helping Barry up. At least everyone was alright. Mostly.

“Well, he’s got… really convenient friends,” she said, giving him a weird look. “You’re kind of exactly what we needed right now.”

Kind of exactly what they needed to take down a speedster, yeah. The thought had occurred.

 


End file.
